The Shape of Tone

Calibrating art and politics in an age of dissonance.

Rebecca Horn, Concert for Anarchy, 1990. Tate Modern, London

I want to begin with two museum experiences—seemingly unrelated—that frame what has been on my mind this week.

In 2019, Amy Sillman was invited to organize an Artist’s Choice exhibition at MoMA. She chose a deceptively simple focus: shape. In her view, shape had been oddly neglected in the discourse of painting, overshadowed by the endless debates around composition, texture, gesture, or brushstroke. The show unfolded as a kind of wunderkammer: works clustered on shelves, less a traditional installation than a study collection designed for comparison. Sillman’s choice reminded me of my own years at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where one of my Imagist professors, Ray Yoshida, was fond of praising “interesting shapes.” Perhaps, growing up and studying in the Midwest, Sillman absorbed a similar sensitivity.

The second experience took place this past summer in a sprawling kunsthalle, where three different exhibitions embodied what I’ll call the documentary impulse of our political present. One, for instance, was a sound installation layering guttural moans (“uuuh…uuuh…uuhhh”) over bass thuds and white noise. Its intended effect was dread. My response was laughter. Not because I take our present crises lightly—my anxieties about the future are as sharp as anyone’s—but because of how easily art, when it tries to perform urgency, tips into camp, sentimentality, didacticism, or unintended parody. That laugh made me wonder whether what we need now is a cartography of tonal misfires: a closer look at the strange aesthetic borderlands where political gravity mutates into theatrical farce.

At first glance these two stories—one about the formal neglect of “shape,” the other about political urgency gone awry—seem like an odd pairing. Yet together they led me to ask: what, in the discourse of political art, occupies the role that shape once did for abstraction? My answer is tone. And tone, far from being secondary, may be the most urgent issue facing us right now.

I keep running into this issue in private conversations within the upper echelons of the art world—above all among donors. That sphere, if you listen closely enough to its whispers and innuendos, is in the grip of a profound identity crisis. The Trump era has thrown it into paranoia: suddenly, the very people who once cheered bold, confrontational art now question the wisdom of supporting it. What I hear, instead, is nostalgia for the not-so-distant Obama years, when art could be audacious without consequence. Today, when critical art is more urgent than ever—and when it is bound to generate repercussions—it is no longer desirable. The ugliness of the work mirrors too directly the ugliness of the moment. Yet abandoning political consciousness altogether would betray the progressive self-image many donors cling to. And so they yearn for a compromise: tragedy rendered poetically, politics smoothed into something lyrical. What emerges is an unspoken demand for art to soften its voice, to retreat into a kind of aestheticized “compassionate conservatism.”

We as artists are part of the same predicament and the most important issue to resolve in this critical moment is precisely the one of tone. History shows that in explosive times, the shrillest outburst seldom persuades; it only confirms the divisions already in place. The task of political art today is to find tones that slip past the barricades—works that open a pause, that seduce thought before the walls of defensiveness go up. In such a climate, strategy lies not in softening the message, but in delivering it in a form that elicits curiosity instead of recoil.

This brings us to the deeper political dilemma facing the left today. In an environment of escalating authoritarianism, the question is whether to respond in kind—to abandon restraint, to “go lower than the right,” violating Michelle Obama’s famous dictum—or to hold fast to the tradition of dignified nonviolence exemplified by the civil rights era. The first path risks corroding one’s own moral ground; the second risks becoming a license for further abuse, as dignity is met not with reciprocity but with exploitation.

It is against this backdrop that we must think about the task of art. For art, like politics, cannot escape the question of tone. Do we echo the shrillness of the moment, sacrificing reflection for impact? Or do we cultivate a more measured register, one that may appear less forceful but has the power to sustain thought across divisions? The answer is not obvious—but the urgency of asking it could not be greater.

This is, in a sense, the same tension I sensed in those two museum encounters. Sillman’s exhibition on shape showed how what seems secondary in discourse can in fact be decisive—how tone, like shape, quietly structures what is possible in art. And my involuntary laughter before that sound installation showed how fragile tone can be—how quickly urgency collapses into parody, or gravity into camp.

The political dilemma of the left—whether to descend into the gutter of its adversaries or to maintain the dignity of principled restraint—is also, at heart, a tonal dilemma. It is the same struggle artists face: how to find a register that does not alienate, that resists both shrillness and sentimental consolations, that can hold open a space for reflection amid panic and polarization. In both politics and art, the real battle may not be over message or content, but over the tonal field in which those messages are heard.

I don’t pretend to have an answer to this tonal dilemma. But I do believe we need to look more seriously at the science of persuasion and what it can teach us. For all the urgency of our political moment, persuasion rarely works through force. Psychologists like Daniel Kahneman have shown how most of our judgments operate through fast thinking—automatic, emotional, defensive—rather than slow, rational deliberation. Robert Cialdini’s research on influence demonstrates that people are more likely to shift their views when they feel affinity, reciprocity, or curiosity, rather than when they feel attacked. Even recent studies on humor and satire suggest that laughter can disarm resistance, opening a space where a difficult truth can be absorbed. The lesson is clear: people do not change their minds when confronted with blunt instruments. They change when tone creates conditions for listening.

In other words, perhaps the real task is not simply to sharpen our critique, but to learn to tune it.

I have been thinking about this often in my own teaching. For the past few years, I’ve taught socially engaged art at the New School College of Performing Arts, where every classroom contains a piano. Week after week, I find myself discussing the urgencies of art and politics with that instrument quietly at my side. Perhaps it has worked its way into my subconscious, because when I think about persuasion and tone, what comes to mind is not performance but tuning.

As a child in Mexico, I remember the piano tuner who would come to our house to work on the old Steinway my sister played. He sat patiently at the keyboard, striking a note again and again, adjusting the peg by the smallest fraction, listening for the faint vibrations that revealed whether the string was sharp or flat. What struck me, even then, was how much of his work was invisible—his ear was attuned to micro-differences that the rest of us could barely perceive. He was less a mechanic than a listener, coaxing harmony out of tension.

I sometimes wonder if our political reality is like that piano: a vast, discordant instrument that can tilt into noise or dissonance at the slightest provocation. And we, as artists, are less like the performers than the tuners. Our job is not only to play but to listen—to find the tonal adjustments, however minute, that might make reflection possible rather than rejection inevitable. Persuasion, in this sense, is not about overpowering with volume. It is about calibrating tone with the precision of someone listening for resonance in the middle of chaos.

My brother, Luis Ignacio Helguera, once wrote a poem about that piano tuner. I include the original in Spanish, with the English translation below.

Como el albañil que nunca tiene la casa que edifica
como el jardinero que vive en un cuartucho sin macetas
como la costurera que nunca tiene el vestido que cose
llegaba el afinador de pianos sin piano propio
llegaba con su hija y su maletín de médico
su oído absoluto atento al corazón del viejo Steinway
sus manos maestras entregadas a las cuerdas cardíacas
a su dentadura de marfil cariado
a sus pedales reumáticos
dejaba cada sonido en su sitio
cada acorde perfecto
y luego, para comprobarlo
medio interpretaba de memoria un nocturno de Chopin
hasta que, afinador de pianos,
daba notas falsas, un pasaje se le olvidaba
y sonreía y cerraba el piano
le pagaba el dueño
y se iba con su maletín de médico y su hija
que le tomaba la mano en la calle y lo miraba en lo alto
con una sonrisa.

Like the mason who never owns the house he builds
like the gardener who lives in a room without flowerpots
like the seamstress who never wears the dress she sews
the piano tuner arrived without a piano of his own.

He arrived with his daughter and his doctor’s satchel,
his perfect pitch attuned to the heart of the old Steinway,
his masterful hands entrusted to its cardiac strings,
to its decayed ivory teeth,
to its rheumatic pedals.

He left every sound in its place,
every chord perfected,
and then, to check,
he would half-play from memory a nocturne by Chopin—
until, piano tuner that he was,
a false note slipped, a passage escaped him,
and he would smile and close the piano.

The owner paid him,
and he left with his doctor’s satchel and his daughter,
who took his hand on the street and looked up at him
with a smile.


Perhaps that is the irony of our task as artists today: the work before us is, in some sense, less “artistic” than technical. Like the piano tuner, we inherit an instrument that is vast, fragile, and out of tune. Our responsibility is not simply to perform upon it, but to listen, to adjust, to bring resonance back where dissonance threatens to overwhelm. It is painstaking, invisible work—more about calibration than display, more about patience than bravura.

And maybe, as we think about tone in art and politics alike, we might take a page—or, to honor the pun, a peg—from the piano tuner’s craft. To recognize that persuasion, like tuning, is not achieved through force, but through subtle attentiveness: the quiet labor of finding, note by note, what will hold.

When I return each week to that music classroom with its silent piano, I am reminded that we are all playing and tuning at once: trying to teach, to make art, to find the right tone in a world gone discordant. Perhaps the best we can do is to keep listening—for the false notes, for the hidden harmonies—and to keep adjusting, until something begins, however briefly, to sound right.